Two FontLab Studio Versions Installed At Once

Is there an easy way to have two different versions of FontLab Studio installed at once on Mac (Mountain Lion)?

The current 5.1.3 version I'm using has less bugs and is nice and stable, but many of the RoboFab Macros seem to be broken, so I'd like to additionally install 5.1.2. and use when needed for certain Macro tasks.

Is it just a matter of installing in a new location, or will it still overwrite some of the source and preference files regardless? Or can it be installed to an external drive and launched from there?

I think that the easiest way to do this is to compress the current installed version in your Applications folder and then install the other version before expanding (unzipping) the existing one. I think this should allow you to run both at once. It looks like this is the recommendation made in the guidelines posted by Adam Twardoch here:

We believe that FontLab Studio 5.1.3 Public Preview build 4692 is better than any previous version of FontLab Studio 5.x for Mac, but we cannot yet confirm and guarantee it. This is why the build has the "beta status". The officially released, confirmed to be stable at the point of its release, is version 5.1.2 build 4447.

Between build 4447 and 4692, we released a number of intermediate builds in which, unfortunately, as it turned out, some things got fixed yet others got broken.

Currently, we believe that we have fixed all the things that got broken after build 4447 — and that’s build 4692. It includes all the "good fixes" after 4447, as well as all the "fixes of the things that got broken".

(In addition, I can say that we have taken some organizational steps that we believe will prevent such things from happening again.)

So far, the feedback on build 4692 has been very good. We at FontLab would really like to thank all the people who have submitted their problem reports and participated in the discussions on our forum over the course of the last 15 months.

We've come a long way since build 4204, our developers fixed over 500 problems, and — again — we believe that build 4692 already is the most stable FontLab Studio ever to exist on Mac OS X.

All I can say is that I sympathize with our colleagues at DTL and URW++. We at FontLab know that developing complex software applications is hard work, and we've learned it the hard way — especially recently. Despite the fact that we've had the largest team of developers and internal QA testers ever — it took us more than two years of full-speed work to move from FontLab Studio 5.0.4 to the current public preview build of 5.1.3.